Jonathan Raymond

In a recent exhibition of eight gouache, ink, and colored pencil portraits, Portland-based polymath Storm Tharp vividly brought to life an array of imaginary characters. Melding influences ranging from Ralph Steadman (the Hunter S. Thompson illustrator, known for his “chrysanthemums” of splashed ink) to Richard Avedon, Japanese woodcuts to French Harlequinism, Tharp corrals bleeding ink into feathery, mottled images of men and women by turns gorgeous and grotesque in their self-presentation. Here, portraiture becomes less an art of resemblance than the making of images touched by a spark of

Largely unknown outside the Pacific Northwest—barring recent appearances in the touring West Coast survey “Baha to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art” and on the cover of Sleater-Kinney’s album The Woods (2005)—Portland painter Michael Brophy achieved a career milestone with this twelve-year retrospective. Organized by the Tacoma Art Museum, Washington, the exhibition included twenty-six of the artist’s signature works: landscapes dominated by second-growth forests, fields of stumps, and slash heaps of logging detritus. Accompanied by curator Rock Hushka’s lengthy essay, the show

Vietnamese/Japanese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba first took to the global art stage at the 2001 Yokohama Triennale with Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Toward the Complex—For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards, 2001, a video featuring images of an underwater rickshaw race performed off the coast of Vietnam. As audiences watched the ubiquitous symbol of the Southeast Asian urban economy, the bicycle-taxi, make its way across the languid yet inhibiting dreamworld of the ocean floor, they immediately recognized an ambiguous, lyrical commentary on Vietnam’s historical and economic

For costuming, see Matthew Barney; for sound, Janet Cardiff; for art direction, Gregory Crewdson. Over the past ten years the art world has witnessed the incremental reinvention of the cinematic wheel, one department at a time, via the movie-besotted mediums of contemporary photography and video. Working together, using their accumulated knowledge of the film industry’s bounces, booms, and production schedules, the aforementioned trio could probably pull off a respectable feature. With Single Wide, 2002, a Möbius-like six-minute, ten-second meditation on memory and narrative, Teresa Hubbard and

In 1999, photographer Alec Soth left his hometown of Minneapolis to take a voyage down the Mississippi River, and found on its banks a world at once ancient and brand-new. He discovered submerged mattresses in dark sloughs in Arkansas; mustachioed men in soiled jumpsuits in Minnesota; overstuffed easy chairs and old pornography in Iowa—the ingrown evidence, in other words, of a peculiarly American brand of dilapidated romance.

Soth’s work represents an old-fashioned kind of imagemaking, fitting into a long line of itinerant photographers running from Carleton Watkins to Robert Frank, all of whom

There are many paths to ecstasy. Some, pace Blake, lead down the road of excess, while others go the way of asceticism. The relationship between heightened states of mind and the process of artmaking has always been close, with the construction of icons, their erasure, and the hard contemplation of color serving as perennial avenues to revelation.

The latest evidence of a nascent trend in the art world toward gnomic, incantatory, and psychedelic ways of creating—alongside the rekindled interest in elder visionaries such as Joan Jonas and Charlemagne Palestine can be seen the generally mystical